Embodiments of the present invention relate to wireless communication systems and, more particularly, to low overhead control signaling of a Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) wireless communication system compatible with a time-division duplex long term evolution (TD-LTE) Radio Access Network (RAN).
A key answer to the huge data demand increase in cellular networks is the deployment of small cells providing Long Term Evolution (LTE) connectivity to a smaller number of users than the number of users typically served by a macro cell. This allows both providing larger transmission/reception resource opportunities to users as well as offloading the macro network. However, although the technical challenges of the Radio Access Network (RAN) of small cells have been the focus of considerable standardization effort through 3GPP releases 10-12, little attention was given to the backhaul counterpart. It is a difficult technological challenge, especially for outdoor small cell deployment where wired backhaul is usually not available. This is often due to the non-conventional locations of small cell sites such as lamp posts, road signs, bus shelters, etc., in which case wireless backhaul is the most practical solution.
The LTE wireless access technology, also known as Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN), was standardized by the 3GPP working groups. OFDMA and SC-FDMA (single carrier FDMA) access schemes were chosen for the DL and UL of E-UTRAN, respectively. User equipments (UEs) are time and frequency multiplexed on a physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH) and a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH), and time and frequency synchronization between UEs guarantees optimal intra-cell orthogonality. The LTE air-interface provides the best spectral-efficiency and cost trade-off of recent cellular networks standards, and as such, has been vastly adopted by operators as the unique 4G technology for the Radio Access Network (RAN), making it a robust and proven technology. As the tendency in the RAN topology is to increase the cell density by adding small cells in the vicinity of a legacy macro cells, the associated backhaul link density increases accordingly and the difference between RAN and backhaul wireless channels also decreases. This also calls for a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) backhaul topology. As a result, conventional wireless backhaul systems typically employing single carrier waveforms with time-domain equalization (TDE) techniques at the receiver become less practical in these environments. This is primarily due to their limitation of operating in point-to-point line-of-sight (LOS) channels in the 6-42 GHz microwave frequency band. On the contrary, the similarities between the small cell backhaul and small cell access topologies (P2MP) and wireless radio channel (NLOS) naturally lead to use a very similar air interface.
There are several special issues associated with NLOS backhaul links at small cell sites, such as a requirement for high reliability with a packet error rate (PER) of 10−6, sparse spectrum availability, critical latency, cost, and relaxed peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Behavior of NLOS backhaul links at small cell sites also differs from RAN in that there is no handover, remote units do not connect and disconnect at the same rate as user equipment (UE) and the NLOS remote unit (RU) and small cell site is not mobile. Moreover, typical NLOS backhaul systems do not support Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) transmissions to confirm reception of UL and DL transmissions.
While preceding approaches provide improvements in backhaul transmission in a wireless NLOS environment, the present inventors recognize that still further improvements are possible. Accordingly, the preferred embodiments described below are directed toward this as well as improving upon the prior art.